David Grossman - Sleeping on a Wire - Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

It was already almost midnight, and jackals yowled outside the house in Ma’alot. They keened so loudly that it seemed as if they were in the room with us. It turned out that they were not far off — they were standing by the wall of the house, munching on the vegetables in the garden, emitting their heartrending, beguiling, and repellent cries.

“What are we going to do here?” Sami Michael sighed. “I really bang my head over it. My ideal would be to reach some kind of joint state, but I don’t think that either we or they are ripe for that. And we’d be a minority very quickly — their natural increase has always been larger than ours. Ten years from now, fifty years from now, they’ll be the majority and they’ll make the decisions. And I, if I’ve got to be a minority, I’d rather not live in this region. I’m willing to be a minority in the U.S., in Australia. But not in this region, so intolerant of minorities. Look at the Kurds in Iraq, the Shiites in southern Iraq, the Christians in Lebanon, in Sudan, and in Egypt — I wouldn’t want to be like them. Not that I’m a big fan of Zionist ideology, I never was, but I’m Zionist enough in that regard, in that I don’t want to be a minority in Israel. I’m not willing.”

I asked Dr. Ami Elad-Buskila, a scholar and translator of Arabic literature, to comment on Sami Michael’s analysis of Arabic culture.

“Arabic culture contains horrible things and wonderful things,” he said. “You can’t reject it entirely. Anyone who rejects and castrates an entire culture will pay the price. To this day in Israel there is a tendency to make Arabic culture foreign and hateful to the general population, and this creates an anomaly. After all, a majority of Israel’s population is a child of that culture. The Israeli Arabs, together with the Oriental Jews, are a decisive majority of Israeli citizens, and hostility to the culture they are rooted in will one day create a cultural and social earthquake.

“I agree completely with some of the things Sami Michael said. But his opinions are correct with regard to what happened in Arabic culture until the end of the 1950s. If we consider literature — it has taken a giant step since then. In the wake of events in Arab society — changes of regime, changes of ideology, changes in the status of women, changes with regard to individualism — there is also a huge transformation in literature, especially in the Arabic short story and novel.

“I’ve just finished translating a novel by Abd Alhakim Kassem, The Seven Days of Man , published in 1969. It’s true that if a modern Westerner reads it, against the background of Proust and Hamsun, he’ll say, ‘Hey, this book isn’t very sophisticated. It’s very nice, deals with the clash between modernization and tradition, but from my point of view it’s passé .’ But I, perhaps because of my personal background, the fact that my family came from Morocco, from a similar world, because I spent my childhood in Jaffa with Arabs, I feel that this novel gives me — I won’t say an escape — but definitely something to hold on to and to remain in, to take refuge in from the world that is sometimes too intense, achievement-oriented, technological, and threatening for me.

“Here in Israel there’s a narrowness to the horizons of knowledge among the local enlightened class. For the Jewish-Israeli intelligentsia, pluralism in literature, for instance, means being open to literature from France, Russia, Germany, South America. But pluralism should also be an enjoyment of Tamil poetry and of Kleist, and also, for instance, of the Sudanese writer Elteib Saleh. Maybe someone who lives in Norway can easily ignore Arabic culture. We have no choice. And this culture really does have something to offer. But what does the average educated Israeli know about stream of consciousness in Arabic literature, about its absurdism and fantasy? About the elements of Sufi mysticism? About the reverberations of the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre in Arabic philosophy? How many literature programs have you heard on Israeli radio about Egyptian, Syrian, or even Persian and Indian writers? How many people are even capable of reading Arabic literature? We think it worthwhile to learn French, English, even Spanish, Italian, and German, but not Arabic. How many people on the Israeli left know Arabic? How many of them are able to conduct a real dialogue with an Arab?”

Poet Saul Tchernikovsky sang of Otrok, an exile from his country who rules, happy and wealthy, “over the land of Avhazim.” His brother, who remained in the homeland, sent a messenger to him — Or, the poet with the violin, who calls on Otrok to return to his country. The wayward Otrok refuses to return. “He forgot his land on his ivory bed.” He also refuses to be tempted by the song of longing to the forgotten native land sung to him by Or. Then Or the poet returns his harp to its case and takes from his pocket a bunch of yemshan, an herb that contains within the aroma of the south Russian homeland, and throws it in Otrok’s face .

Gray distances…the day has just lit…

The horses’ hooves are cautious…

Otrok comes, the bunched herb in his hand ,

Smells and smells again — freedom

And tears stream down his cheeks .

On the road that leads from Teibe to Jajulia, in the southern Triangle, I was suddenly filled with a yemshan happiness. A joy at this bare-topped, constricted countryside. On the side of one of the roads, one from which no village could be seen, neither Jewish nor Arab, I stopped and began to wander between the olive trees and boulders and unplowed fields. The sky and a few crooked branches spread over me, and I had a strange urge to peel this land of its names and designations and descriptions and dates, Israel, Palestine, Zion, 1897, 1929, 1936, 1948, 1967, 1987, the Jewish state, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, the Land of Splendor, the Zionist Entity, Palestine. I kept peeling — with a slight twinge of the heart — the paved roads and wide boulevards, the green lawns of the kibbutzim, the parking lots and traffic lights and road signs, the luxurious neighborhoods that look as if they had been written by a copywriter, the water parks and fountains and swimming pools, the synagogues, the mosques, and the churches, the envy-inducing mansions in the villages, the shopping centers and American shopping malls in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Jewish National Fund forests, the green European illusion we have conjured up here to cover the cracks in the skin of an angry and resentful land, a thin, desiccated membrane with one small lake and a thirsty river. A country, Tchernikovsky wrote, in which “one must soften every inch of land, battle every boulder.” And Salim Jubran responded, “As a mother loves her malformed child, so I love you, my homeland.” There, between two anonymous hills, the forgotten primeval visions returned so clearly to me, that special shade of Israel, brown and rocky, the biblical, pre-Zionist land that the Zionist fathers longed for and beautified in their dreams and poetry, and which they afterward confined and repainted with their deeds .

It was here, in an area crowded with Arab villages, in a place where Zionism has a kind of bare spot in the map of its consciousness, a triangular birthmark, where the tense bowstrings of the definition of Israeliness momentarily slacken in confusion, that I could again sense the simple and mysterious love of the land — that is, of the land itself, prior to any name or title — of this strip of the planet that fate has burdened us with, with its colors and aromas and land and trees and changing seasons. Who knows whether he really loves his land, or if he is doomed to love it because he is made in its mold .